Empty Chair Technique Worksheet

Empty Chair Technique Worksheet Overview

The empty chair technique lets you speak to someone as if they were sitting in an empty chair in front of you. It became well known through Gestalt therapy, developed by Fritz Perls and colleagues, and psychologist Leslie Greenberg later studied it as a way to work through unfinished business with someone who hurt you, has died, or is no longer in your life.

The exercise is most often done in a therapy session. This worksheet explains the steps, helps you prepare what you want to say, and gives you questions to make sense of how you feel afterward.

In this worksheet, we’ll:

• Explain how the empty chair technique works, step by step
• Help you prepare who you will speak to and what feels unfinished
• Give you sentence starters for what you want to say
• Provide space to reflect on how you feel afterward